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Abstract Rape is often considered traumatizing for those who have experienced it and also for those who hear about it. We explore how a content‐based semester‐long study of sexualized violence and harm incorporates the language arts of close readings, critical thinking, low stakes writing in journals, film and theater analyses, and playwrighting in order to bring sexualized violence and harm into the discourse of the class we call Seeing Rape, and then into student‐written theater performance by the same name for our college community. By examining how we study rape in the course, we explore how the class practices and models speaking about rape and sex to be able to give voice to rape trauma and its public secrecy. This paper is written as an auto‐ethnographic collaborative effort undertaken by two professors and two former undergraduates who reflect on their processes in a course and then later in the theater. The professors will discuss how students are encouraged in the class to confront, critique, and contest how cultures define rape and/or silence rape stories as well as how instruction can challenge the ways in which rape is manipulated as a concept in culture. The former students' auto‐ethnographic reflections about their linguistic choices from among their communicative repertoires in the creation of their theatrical representations of rape comprise the main findings of the study.